﻿Family History an example..

My mother was recently given a scrapbook of photos that her mother, Violet K. Rowberry, had put together over 70 years ago. So I got busy scanning! I wanted to share this with family and even the extended family that I don't personally know. They will find it... on familysearch.org.I've included these pages here, scanned at high resolution (1200 DPI) to show how it is done, and the photos are grouped by scrapbook page (click button). Maybe others will be inspired by it as much as I was inspired by coming across this treasure trove of photos and family history and notes!

Family Search. What is your story?​The FamilySearch Story

A COMMITMENT TO CONNECT ANCESTORS is central to the Familysearch.org home.The FamilySearch services and website is probably why the internet was invented. Its growing, its huge, and has a noble purpose! Families.Think of it! Most of us don't know who our ancestors are. But we are finding out now! Some of us don't even know who our immediate aunts and uncles are, or cousins, let alone those who lived one or two generations back. This mystery is unfolding now with this website in a fascinating and organized way. It is helping to make families feel closer together, even thought we never met in person... and its building understanding about where we came from and possibly why our lives are turning out the way they do.

I love this website. Familysearch.org has been committed to helping people connect with their ancestors. FOR FREE. Just sign up and start searching and building YOUR family tree of photos, stories, audio, and the genealogy record. So much has been found already. It you haven't done this yet, there is information about YOUR family ancestors already waiting to be found and connected to you and your family. Since 1999 shortly after the internet launched, this has been going on. It is rooted in spiritual beliefs—that families are meant to be central to our lives and that family relationships are intended to continue beyond this life. It's really cool, the feeling that you get as you see the dots begin to connect to your present and the past, in a puzzle of information that grows in clarity as the information that thousands of people have been collecting and submitting begins to come together. I have experienced this, the fascination of seeing pictures and reading stories about people in the past, but not just any people, these are my flesh and blood relatives, the family tree of people who are related to me, and I feel a special kinship towards them.

G r a n t J o h n s o n

Here's an example of what I did today. I uploaded 70 scanned photos and started tagging faces, entering some other info about the photos, linked it to my family tree, etc. Just started with my HUGE endless family!

OK.To the right here is a page from my account at familysearch.org, and a recent photo that I uploaded. I came across a scrapbook that my grandmother Violet Klossner put together about 70 years ago, it was brittle and falling apart, so I scanned each page at high resolution on my home scanner at 1200 DPI and then saved each picture separately. Then I uploaded these as a batch, just dragged and dropped them in, and then I got busy TAGGING them like you do in Facebook, but this is much better.You can also link them to YOUR family tree. You can make albums. You can enter a story. You can add audio, etc. etc. and so each of these pictures can been found by others in your family who look up the same person. And there they are! Its a fantastic way for families to come together in building their family tree and treasure trove of information that tells their family story.

I think the important thing to say here, is how I FEEL about all this. I am fascinated. I am excited. I think I am doing something really important. I don't know all the reasons, but there is something really special about your own family, and then when your ancient family starts to appear before your eyes and you see who they are, what they looked like, who they married, read their stories, see the siblings, ...this is a really cool thing. Something that feels like probably the most important thing in the world, actually. What could be more important than learning about your own family? ...and then when you think of the blessings of the gospel that can be extended to them as well, then it becomes CLEAR why we would feel excited about all of this.

Malachi 4:65 ¶Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 Andhe shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

I'm feeling it. I am feeling this turning of the heart of the children (me) to the fathers (my ancestors) and there is obviously some purpose to it. These are the very last words of the Old Testament. A huge statement by the ancient prophet Malachi. I think it is very significant. Look at what is happening. How special is it that we now have an internet, a database of families that is bringing families closer together. Its a very special thing.

Here's my Family Tree, just a few generations. It goes way back and expands to show details of who the families are, my cousins, my aunts, grandparents, great uncles...

I can click on any one of these people and learn about them. I am benefitting from the work that so many OTHER people did to put this in there, and the many years of multiple people who have helped organize this information, and I too am helping to provide clarity where I can on things that I know. So this is a huge collaborative worldwide effort taking place. It has to do with families. You see, there are descendants of my ancestors who grew up somewhere else, possibly even in another country. I don't know these people (yet), but they have been working on this database of our family too. I am benefitting from seeing the work that others have done, and this weekend I uploaded and put in almost 100 photos from a special scrapbook of my grandmother and organized them into the family tree so that others can see this scrapbook contents and learn from it. Maybe it will be the picture of their grandmother that they never knew what she looked like or where she lived, or what her house was like. Now they can learn a little more about that. HOW FANTASTIC IS THIS? It is beyond description, really. Its a vast worldwide collaboration that is taking place between people in many places of the world who for the most part, probably don't even know each other BUT they are in many cases related. This huge family tree, the largest in the world and growing rapidly, is probably the most special thing about the internet, and probably the most valuable thing ON the internet today. Perhaps it is the reason the Lord allowed the invention of the internet: GENEALOGY and FAMILIES.